"The One with the Tiny T-Shirt." By Adam Chase. Perf. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer, and James Michael Tyler. Dir. Terry Hughes. Friends. Season 3, episode 19. NBC. 27 March 1997. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2003.The omnivorous Shakespeare Geek usually beats me to the punch in relaying information about forthcoming Shakespeare films and cultural references to Shakespeare—which is why you should all follow his blog as well as mine—and this is no exception. In fact, Shakespeare Geek's blog called my attention to this Shakespeare reference in Friends. His post, written in 2008, mentions a brief Shakespeare joke in the show; however, his post doesn't provide the context or a nifty video clip. I felt that it was up to me to do so.
In this clip, Joey is mad at an actress who is treating him as an inferior because of her training in drama. Searching for a way to explain how she thinks she's better than anyone else, Joey ends his sentence with a cliché that doesn't quite jive with the beginning of his sentence:
Chandler is quick to jump on the incongruity and to imagine a speculative actress who is actually named Sliced Bread (the caption on the image above should have capitalized "Bread" to stay with the joke)—one who made herself memorable as great by playing the role of Lady Macbeth. Once again, Shakespeare demonstrates his usefulness as a marker of cultural greatness—as does Shakespeare Geek.
Links: The Episode at IMDB.
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(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
So, I didn't understand the joke anyway. What is Sliced Bread? I watched Friends in translation and understood it as a name of some foodstuff, in Russian translation it was kinda 'sliced sausage'.
ReplyDeleteThe difficulty is that it's an idiom that is not used quite properly. The idiom is "The best thing since sliced bread," and it means something like "An amazing thing." Joey doesn't use it right, and Chandler plays up on that by pretending the phrase "sliced bread" is the name of an actress: "Sliced Bread."
ReplyDeleteI like the idea that the Russian translation takes "bread" to mean "sausage."
Take care, and thanks for the question!
kj
The Ukrainian translation was excellent, from my point of view.
ReplyDeleteIt was something like:
- she thinks she plays like Saint-bernard [dog breed, like the one from the Beethoven comedy movie]
- you mean, Sarah Bernhardt [french actress]
The pronunciation is almost the same, despite of spelling. And it’s really funny :)
I love all that enormously! Thank you so much, Traveller!
ReplyDeletekj